I began A Deadly Wandering with one question in mind: How would this book help traffic safety advocates combat the rising tide of electronic distracted driving?
I advocate. My seventeen-year-old son Reid died in a one-car crash in 2006. He died from inexperience with how to handle a skid, not from texting. Since his passing, I have worked to provide parents with better information about the dangers of teen driving, and texting and distraction have been critical subjects. I opened A Deadly Wandering hoping for a manual about how to curb this epidemic. When I finished book, I had some answers, but not in the way I expected.
This book, in fact, is largely a crime and science thriller, about the State of Utah struggling with the case of a nineteen-year-old student whose texting caused a crash and the deaths of two scientists. In 2006, when the crash occurred, texting was new technology; only Washington State had outlawed it while driving. Utah’s prosecutors labored to understand from science whether the risks of texting while driving were obvious to an average driver, which would determine whether the State’s charge would be negligent homicide, manslaughter, or something else. Utah’s prosecution of Reggie Shaw became the nation’s “seminal case” about texting while driving.
After introducing the principals as ordinary people and recounting the crash, Richtel masterfully melds the legal conundrum – whether and how to charge Reggie with a crime – with the scientific inquiry – what actually happens to the brain and attention span when a driver texts?
The unfolding legal struggle provides the book’s most compelling episodes. Reggie initially lies to the police about what caused the crash, saying he has no memory of texting at the moment that his vehicle wandered into the oncoming lane, causing the scientists’ car to swerve into the path of a pickup truck. Or did he lie? Did he truly not remember – because his attention had been diverted? Reggie’s claim leads to a police officer’s suspicion, an investigator’s effort to match phone records with the crash timeline, prosecutors crafting a charge that a jury would understand and punish, and Reggie’s family and their lawyer protecting him by stalling. Another prosecutor weighs the ramifications of bringing a criminal case in central Utah against a clean-cut, well-spoken young Mormon preparing to leave on a Church mission. The phenomenon of texting as a new technology presents a judge with the issue of whether a neuroscientist may testify as an expert that texting while driving is “inherently dangerous.” Meanwhile, the victims’ families grieve and rage.
Richtel folds in attention science, providing a chronology of the discipline and the efforts of neuroscientists to evaluate how this new way of communicating diverts attention. We learn about the difference between top-down attention, which is our focus and goals, and bottom-up stimuli that compete for that attention and, if powerful enough, redirect it. Demonstrating the qualities that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for reporting on how cell phones interrupt driving, Richtel provides a compendium that leaves no doubt that texting is life-threatening: Multi-tasking is a myth; we don’t handle two or more tasks, we switch from one to the other. Texting is alluring because it responds to our primal needs to be socially connected and to learn whether an incoming message — especially when buried among spam — is an opportunity or threat that we ignore at our peril. Hands-free electronic devices while driving are just as risky as hand-held ones, and voice-activated controls may be even worse in causing “cognitive blindness.”
Reggie, the legal system, and neuroscience converge when Reggie listens to Dr. David Strayer, a leading expert on texting and driving, testify at a pretrial hearing how the sender of text messages can be so distracted as to completely lose sight of the traffic situation and remember nothing about the communication. The book’s most powerful sentence may be Dr. Strayer’s warning that when drivers text, they lose “just about all the characteristics associated with safe driving.” As Reggie begins to understand the science and its explanation of what happened, his epiphany and redemption begin, and they lead – after years of denial and agony for the victims’ families – to his plea bargain, to his becoming a national spokesperson against texting while driving, and to Utah adopting a strict anti-texting law.
Along the way, Richtel issues indictments, such as chastising the wireless communication companies for their hypocrisy in the early 2000s, when they fought legislation that would limit or ban cell phone use, while also protecting themselves by warning drivers of the risks they already knew to exist. Richtel recounts the federal government’s tepid response to the obviously growing dangers of electronic distraction, and he takes auto manufacturers to task for installing ever-larger and more complex, interactive, Internet-ready screens in the dashboards of new cars.
As well told a story as A Deadly Wandering is, traffic safety advocates may be disappointed at times. The book’s description of neuroscientists working to document the risks of electronic distraction may give the general public the misleading impression that the debate continues about whether texting is dangerous. In addition, the book only contains the briefest mention of the biggest neurological phenomenon in safe teen driving, the fact that the human brain does not fully develop until we reach age 22 to 25, and the last part to develop is the prefrontal cortex, which provides judgment and restraint. Reggie was 19, and safe teen driving advocates will bemoan the omission of delayed brain development as an explanation for Reggie’s conduct.
Because Matt Richtel is a reporter, one can understand his keeping a distance from prescribing and lobbying for stronger anti-texting laws, yet one wonders whether he should have expressed more outrage. After all, he makes a compelling case that cell phone providers, auto manufacturers, and electronics companies have essentially been experimenting with the safety of the driving public for more than a decade. The reader is left to wonder why we don’t handle in-vehicle electronics the way the Food and Drug Administration treats new medicines – no public marketing, sale, or use until the product has been proven safe. Lastly, Richtel several times refers to Reggie’s incident as an “accident,” even though the central message of the book is that it was a “crash” – that is, entirely preventable.
When I finished reading, however, I went back to my original question: How will this book help the traffic safety community to end distracted driving? A Deadly Wandering will quickly become ammunition for advocates in several ways. First, as longtime advocate Barbara Harsha observes in the book, one way to battle misplaced attitudes and behavioral disconnects is to “put a human face on the problem.” This book does so masterfully. Second, Richtel’s compendium should put to rest any and all debate about whether texting is dangerous. While distinguishing between texting and drunk driving, Richtel essentially makes the case that the safety risks are comparable and thus the penalties should be similar. He also makes a compelling point that cell phone and texting laws are poorly written and confusing, sending mixed messages to the driving public.
Third, and most important, A Deadly Wandering gives the traffic safety community what it needs right now: science, research, and a story that should help change the culture of texting and electronic distraction, making it unacceptable behavior, as we have done largely (though by no means completely) with alcohol and seat belts. It is a principle of law enforcement that success depends on the consent of the governed, and to consent, the public needs to understand how truly threatening texting is to the safety of everyone on the road. Only then will legislators find the political will to challenge texting with the strongest possible legal tool, making it a criminal offense.
Like the first-rate reporter that he is, Matt Richtel has made the case for the traffic safety community. He has laid a challenge at the feet of advocates and lawmakers. If safer driving is a culture war, this book fires a salvo that will be impossible to ignore.
As with so many aspects of safe driving, there is a sad truth here, which is that as a society, we often adopt safety measures only in response to tragedy. Utah adopted strict punishment for texting because of the rocket scientists’ deaths and Reggie Shaw’s remorse. The modern drunk driving movement gained momentum in 1987 in Kentucky, when a driver with several DUI convictions plowed into a school bus and killed 25 children. Will it take a horrific multiple-fatality crash caused by a text message to turn the tide? The good news is that A Deadly Wandering is so powerful and well-documented as to offer the possibility that we will be willing to stop texting without waiting for an unimaginable loss of life.
